Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Al Lord, the former chief executive of student-loan giant Sallie Mae, has a complaint about higher education: The price of college is too damn high. Paying for his grandchildren’s education in recent years, he said, left him appalled at the tuition bills that land on his desk every semester. For those who know (or in…
The Civil Media Co. bills itself as a solution to some pressing problems in modern journalism, pitching a new cryptocurrency that would help news consumers support quality information and weed out bad actors. So far, the effort isn’t going smoothly. Consumer demand for the new so-called token that the company is selling has been weak…
Some employees in a Wells Fargo WFC +0.15% & Co. unit that handles business banking improperly altered information on documents related to corporate customers, according to people familiar with the matter. The behavior again raises questions about Wells Fargo’s risk-management practices and controls. The bank has been sanctioned in recent months by federal regulators for problems in these areas…
Visa Inc. is ditching the signature. The largest U.S. card network announced Friday that merchants, starting in April, will no longer be required to make consumers sign for debit and credit-card purchases, signaling the demise for a procedure that was once a linchpin of keeping transactions secure. The other major U.S. networks, Mastercard Inc., MA 0.88% American Express Co. and Discover Financial Services , DFS 0.19% in recent months said they would take…
Gee thanks, Gus. Gus isn’t a real person, but it’s the pseudonym Senator Al Franken assigned to the Equifax Inc. employee who holds a lot of the blame for the theft of 145.5 million Americans’ personal data. Former Chief Executive Officer Richard Smith told Franken and other senators Wednesday that Equifax was breached largely because of…
Scanning And Sorting How the banking industry, with an assist from tech, turned an incredibly frustrating, manual process—sorting checks—into an excellent example of automation. Today in Tedium: The physical check, for most general purposes, is a sheer relic—basically used mostly for specific big-ticket purchases like rent, it certainly doesn’t have the sex appeal of, say,…
When Kyle Allen gets home from work each day, he heads straight for his mailbox. “It does give me a rush,” says the 29-year-old financial analyst from Orlando. What he hopes to find is yet another offer for a new credit card. He and his wife together have 40 of them and have earned, so…
A real-estate startup called Compass Inc. has hired hundreds of sales agents away from older rivals, collected $225 million from marquee investors and amassed a valuation of over $1 billion, all with the pitch that its software can make brokers more efficient. Real-estate veterans say they’re baffled by how the four-year-old firm, active in only…